Mon 5 Mar 2007
This effort is misguided.
Spencer representative Jonathan Misk ‘07 plans to submit a proposal to both the Council and the administration recommending student representation on the Board of Trustees. “Our only goal is to improve communication where it is most needed,” he said. “Such student interaction with Board members would both allow the students to be more informed of issues the Board is discussing and allow the Board to be more in touch with real-time student sentiment on those issues.”
The College will never go for this plan in the short term. The Trustees are busy, important people with much to do during their limited meeting time. When they are talking business, they want to do so openly but in confidence. They don’t want to deal with a student (a new one each year!), explaining to her the background on topics that they have covered for years, worrying if she might not treat the proceedings as private.
Moreover, the Trustees already meet with plenty of students and are, reasonably, well-versed on student opinion, both via the Record and from direct contact. Morty, being a very smart president, forwards substantive, well-written comments that students send him directly to all the trustees. One trustee commented to me ruefully that his inbox overflowed from all the student commentary on neighborhood housing that he received from Morty.
But, although this won’t happen quickly, what steps might Misk and others takes to lay the groundwork for it to happen someday? Good question! Other schools, after all, do have student representation on the board, so all things are possible.
1) Fight to increase the transparency of Trustee meetings. When are they? When is the next one? What is on the agenda? When do the Trustees arrive? Who will they be meeting with? And so on. There is no (good) reason why Williams might be much more open and transparent in how it is governed. Yet no one (besides me!) fights for this. Why isn’t the agenda and other distributed materials made public, perhaps after the meeting? The College could certainly redact any sensitive information (having to do with super-secret plans or confidential personnel issues) before distributing the information.
2) Fight to de-mystify the trustees. Although the College does provide nice little biographies, other details are sketchy. For starters, what are their terms of office? How are they selected? I provide some (correct?) information here, but there is no reason for secrecy. (I still don’t understand how, for example, Malcolm W. Smith ‘87 could lose the election for alumni trustee and still end up on the board. Anyone who the board is considering for an appointed position should not be nominated for alumni trustee.)
3) Participate in the election process. There is a trustee election going on right now. Misk should interview the three candidates, find out their views on important topics and transmit those views (along with his commentary) to the College community. EphBlog (with our thousands of readers) would be happy to host. Why not a podcast? No doubt Misk would do a better job of this than I have in the past.
4) Instead of aiming for a student seat on the board, Misk should try for the much more achievable goal of a student seat on the Executive Committee (EC) of the Society of Alumni (SoA). I don’t think that we need a student trustee but I do think that a student (even three students) belong on the EC.
Note that you do not need to graduate to be an alumnus. Anyone who has attended Williams, even for just a year, is a member. So, there is no reason in principle why students shouldn’t belong. Also, five trustees are ex-officio members of the EC, so student participation would give Misk some of the trustee interaction he seeks. The fact that EC terms are for three years also works out well. Imagine that each class at Williams elects one of its members to join the EC at the end of first year. That student would serve for 3 years, just like any other member. There would always be 3 students on the EC, enough to have a real voice but not too many to gum up the works. And, if this experiment worked out, there would be much less opposition for a student place on the board in 5 or 10 years.
This is the sort of good-governance, small-improvement campaign that EphBlog could get behind. Misk is welcome to join us as an author to help rally the alumni community and keep us posted on his progress.
March 5th, 2007 at 7:05 am
First of all, for as long as I can remember, the college has put a student on the search committees for President. (Martha Coakley ‘75 served on the committee that appointed President Chandler). So it isn’t as if students are completely ignored in the longterm governing of the college.
Second, suggestion number four (put a student on the Executive Committee of the Society of Alumni) ignores the fact that the Society of Alumni represents the graduates, not the students. The EC is already pretty big, in order to represent the many flavors of alumni (age, major, location, professions) and adding a student representative strikes me as politically correct but not helpful nor appropriate.
That said, the Alumni Office does try and bring recent graduates into both the Executive Committee (policy body) and the Vice Chairs (fund-raising body). For example, the Head Class Agents for the most recently graduated class are automatically members of the Vice Chair Committee for the first year. It helps them get acclimated to the work, understand the larger issues in Williams fund raising, and explain to the older alums how recent graduates communicate.
For example, a longstanding debate has been whether it’s appropriate for the college to let Class Agents ask for money for Williams via e-mail. Ten years ago, it was verboten. Now class agents do it based on what their classmates are comfortable with–the older classes largely stick to paper letters and the younger classes are electronic. A large part of that shift was due to recent graduates continually telling us that paper just gets heaved. (I know, it seems a simple point, but abandoning a strategy that worked for hundreds of years is hard to do.)
But I digress. While I applaud more transparency about how the college works–while at the same time not hampering its freedom and open debate–I think putting student(s) on Society of Alumni committees because students can’t/won’t be appointed to the Board of Trustees is wrong.
Interviews with Trustees that appear in The Record, or an interview in the Alumni Review on how the Trustees handle a project (e.g., how is the Board interacting with the college on Sawyer/Stetson–how detailed does the talk get, when does the Board give certain green lights) would do a better job of this than making one student’s resume look good.
And by the way, since the above post appears on a blog about an educational institution, “principal” in the next to last paragraph should be spelled “principle”–”principal” means “main,” as in school principal; “principle” stands for a stance or conviction.
March 5th, 2007 at 10:58 am
1) Which students were on recent presidential search committees? We need to capture this history.
2) I agree that the suggestions above, especially more detailed Record coverage, would be excellent.
3) Corrections made. Thanks!
March 19th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
As a former Williams student who served with the Board of Trustees on the “Committee on Honorary Degrees,” I know the trustees value and respect the input of thoughtful students who have researched their ideas, participate in governance processes, and present concrete proposals.
I think that having elected student trustees with voting representation on the board is a good idea, perhaps with two-year terms to give their participation greater continuity between classes.
I do agree that there is a real possibility that “resume padders” will run for this position, but at the same time I think it is a good idea for students to participate in governance and to share some of the responsibility for the college at which they study.
I wouldn’t write off the possibility that the Board of Trustees might agree to this IF a credible proposal is developed over time and a good track record of student participation in governance committees exists at the time of the proposal.
March 19th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
The President and Vice-President of the Student Council automatically serve as non-voting observers at Board of Managers meetings at Swarthmore.
There’s a little bit of semantics involved, since the formal Board meetings are large gatherings where reports from the Board subcommittees are presented and votes taken. I don’t think that student observers attend the smaller sub-committee meetings.
The Board members also attend a luncheon with students during the week of each semi-annual Board meeting.
Student initiatives are frequently presented to the Board and directly impact decisions. Examples of student-initiatives that eventually gained Board approval over the years have been the banning of sororities, divestiture of holdings in South Africa, last year’s watered-down living wage initiative, and last month’s Board decision to increase to 35% the amount of the College’s electricty purchased from wind generation plants.
My sense is that the College administration uses student presentations to the Board as a means of applying pressure and gaining support on the Board. There’s a tradition of the Board responding to student initiative.